Global-US Forecasting and Insights Director - CVRM

The Global-US Forecasting and Insights Director - CVRM is a critical business partner to the brand team, producing brand revenue, patient and volume forecasts and consulting with the team on how to manage risks and opportunities for the business.  You will have responsibility for a specific Global and US CVRM brand, playing an integral role in understanding performance, setting expectations for performance and guiding brand strategy.  You will be responsible for implementing and ensuring consistent application of best practices across the organization drawing from inside and outside the industry, leading to objective forecasts supported by Insights and Analytics.  You will partner with other parts of the Global Insights Business Excellence (GIBEX) organization to help develop and implement new capabilities and improvements and assist in training across the Forecasting and Insights community. 

You will develop product-specific short-term and long-term forecasts models and maintain up-to-date forecast models, reflecting current data, information, assumptions; lead the forecasting and business planning processes and all associated work streams (sales bridges, ad hocs supporting Finance, etc.); identify key business issues that impact short-term and long-range product and market forecasts; clearly and pro-actively surface these issues, incorporate the results of primary research into the forecast model(s) to reflect anticipated risks and opportunities on sales outlook, and define forecasting processes and build capabilities in forecasting for new and inline assets. In addition, you will have responsibility to develop forecasts for your focused therapeutic area using patient based forecast models, and ensure alignment on forecast assumptions and other critical analytical assessments with business partners including Marketing, Sales, Market Access and Pricing, Market Research, Global Marketing and Insight, Finance, and Sales Operations. 

This role is reserved for someone with proven Pharmaceutical Commercial sales forecasting experience with deep forecasting and quantitative technical skills combined with superior communication skills.  As such, those who will qualify for this position are both technically sound and have the ability to be a proactive internal consultant, adding value to AstraZeneca's commercial organization beyond their forecasting prowess through their understanding of secondary data, market research, industry knowledge, and track record of innovative and impactful decision support. 

Accountabilities:

• Construct Global long-term patient-based and US short-term TRx / NBRx forecast models that leverage credibly bold and ambitious data inputs synthesized from a variety of primary and secondary sources, are benchmarked against internal and external analogs and for Global are coordinated with key markets 

• Develop new product introduction volume forecasts, both short-term and long-term, to feed into strategic and operational planning processes. 

• Serve as functional subject matter expert in established market and disease areas of interest to the Global and US Commercial teams 

• Summarize and confidently present forecasts, including approach, methodology and assumptions, through various communication channels and be able to “tell the story” to senior commercial and clinical stakeholders 

• Ensure objectivity and robustness around the forecast via identification of the right data sources and application of industry-leading modeling approaches, with sensitivity analyses around key variables to assist in opportunity and risk management and championing the use of local customer insights 

• Access and evaluate appropriate information via a variety of internal and external tools and source, monitoring the external environment to stay up-to-date 

• Partner with Market Access, Pricing and Finance to understand access and price impact, assist estimation of SMM and support development of P&L for opportunity evaluations 

• Demonstrate a high level of understanding of the points of integration of our work and that of our colleagues 

Desirable Skills & Experience:

• Advanced degree preferred (e.g., PhD / MBA / Masters in areas such as Statistics/Decision Sciences)